Saturday, July 31, 2010

I've always found the love affairs of my four sisters important. Bess is collecting mushrooms this summer, tending the garden, taking the dog for jogs. When her love comes to visit he is so pale we all stare too long and make him blush. What will you do in September, I ask her. And she says she doesn't know. But, I can't decide if she is in love or he is in love with her and she has put a hand out to keep love at bay. When she tells me her love is going away without her, I worry. Her love leaves and hugs me good-bye, he must be the one in love. Where are you going in September, I ask Bess. Maybe to teach somewhere, she says. She puts all her mushrooms on the table and with the book her love has left, she looks for the names of her collection. In the picture of the mushrooms on the open page of the book from her pale love, the mushrooms whirl or is it whorl, dizzying me. I worry about these loves, the lost ones and then found. Bess says if you cut the mushroom right, it'll grow back, not to worry. She keeps finding them, picking them, bringing them home. In the garden her beans grow and yesterday I saw two red tomatoes, the first of the season.

Saturday, July 17, 2010

I have only lifted the cover of her book of poetry/open text titled [one love affair]* and I am already in love with the concept of Jenny Boully. But, this isn't about Jenny Boully, rather my/our strange love of books as living objects, the idea of things as entities, worlds, unto themselves, and the way a book lives its own life, loves and hates and holds and rejects its readers, regardless of their particular creeds.

I think about the book I want to make within the context of a publishing industry itching to catch up with the music industry digital sounds and words with gadgets like the I pad, Kindle, E books... Words dangle there in the outer realms of unnamed space, intangible, tangled, untouchable. What is a book if it isn't a physical object? If a book is only text and not the white space, the color, smell, touch of its page, art of its jacket, what is the thing that is the book, what then homes "book"? Here, I pause and think, Art Objects!, the book must live in a home, the book must exist as an object (its own physical entity taking up real space) or it will lose its essence, its soul, its body, and we understand in this world of the twenty-first century that the erasure of the “body” and the loss of home equates to the destruction of the spirit and the soul, whatever that means to each one of us.

Last semester I sat in a lecture on the new digital age of publishing; I remember little from this lecture except for the odor of winter sweat and body, the dry heat, the gray sunlight through thrifty blinds, and this sentence on the handout: Make shorter paragraphs, people want a quick read.

As a sometimes researcher, I understand the convenience of the I pad when it comes to portability, isn't it easier to carry all that info, pages marked and highlighted ready to be cut and pasted, in one thin screen? Yes.

What do you lose? What happens to information? To art? To the text? The book is a work of art.

*

I spent a week water color painting images from old science books, each little drawing of amoeba, bone, bird, tree, shell was done by hand in these books. Someone carefully scribed the images. As I copied them with my own eye, I began to feel a certain magic. The birds are not real birds, but the imagined images of stasis; like a book, life is not real life, but imagined stasis, the cavern of reflection and recollection, the home of the imagination, and thus of magic. All good things come from what I am here calling “magic” it is the realm of the pretend, the imagined, the possible. We dream of utopias, not because we want to create utopias (though we try) but because unless we pause and throw all the known pieces of the world to the wind, let them scatter across counties, countries, continents, and look again at what might be possible, we are unable to image _________. We are unable to see beyond. The old bird sketches, skeletal system sketches, drawings of life systems brought me closer to this imagined world of science, where stasis on the page makes the idea of things possible. Where the idea of things can be represented and thus known, not as they actually are, we cannot know this, but as we imagine, as all knowledge occurs.

I want to make a book. To write it, yes, but "to make" is equally important. I need it to occupy real space, to live its own life like a child put out into the world as a physical being. To love its readers as it chooses. To find its own life journey through cities, countries, languages. To find an untimely dumpster death only to be resurrected by some dirty kid trying to make life her own way, to get sold to a book dealer, and bought by an old man who holds the book tenderly, falling to sleep with the book on his chest, waking to her pages crinkled by his body in the morning. Smiling.

The "living system of the book" or the book as [living system]*, refers to the home, the body, and the life of the book. Asks what space means in terms of art, and whether writing and making books exist together, whether the book desires or requires a home, a body, a physical life of its own.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Everything is story: The yellow finch at the bird feeder.Sister with her lips red, mother in the wine.Father keeps the seed in the little house where the finch returns.

I am all poet and it ruins my scope.The storm washes over the lakethe dog's feet sound like bird clawson the wooden floor, he turns upto rest his head in my lap. No love better than dog love, early this summer morning.

Against a sea of pine green the white birchtrunk charts—severe in manner—the distance between the white hips of memoryswing, and she, mother, lover, sister, dream,retreats or returns, a bowl of water in her handsurging you to wash the tips of your fingers cleanand enter with her, the dream. I remember.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

About Me

I once heard a poet speak of the mouth of the river -- a place I sensed was full and rushing with both glee and the sorrow that makes us seek higher thought through which we might be sustained in this wilderness of passing through. Welcome. Please write me here often.
I am a writer, teacher, and mother living in Vermont.